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Size of corruption in India

The menace of corruption in the country is pegged at Rs 15,55,000 crore (Rs 15,550 billion) in the last decade and a lot more than that has been laundered out of India using illicit gateways, a recent study has claimed.

According to a first of its kind report on ‘Ascertaining size of corruption in India with respect to money laundering’, an individual spent over Rs 2,000 as a cost of corruption in 2009, which is 260 per cent higher than the amount borne by a citizen ten years back.

“In the past decade, money laundered out of India was at least Rs 18,86,000 crore or $419 billion. This quantification of the laundering is worked out on the most pessimistic manner and by considering the global parameters,” it said.

The study was conducted by a Pune-based company Indiaforensic, which has pioneered in fraud examination, security, risk management and forensic accounting research and has been for long helping the country’s investigating agencies like CBI in several high profile cases.

It is based on the analysis of scarce data available for measuring money laundering described through three models– property recovery, crime based and GDP based.

“If the gross domestic product-based money laundering model is translated to quantify the corruption, then the size of corruption in the last decade is Rs 15,55,000 crore or $345 billion in India,” the report said.